What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?

How do you know what you want to be when you grow up, when you’ve never been there? Wanting something is a personal projection into the future. The future hasn’t happened yet. Knowing what you want to be requires experiences you haven’t yet had. So how do you experience the future when it hasn’t happened? You imagine it happening.  

Since the brain doesn’t know the difference between what you actually experience and what you imagine experiencing, you can learn from your imagined experiences. The best way to learn about your future is to practice imagining it.

You have probably heard the saying, “Be careful what you wish for because you might get it.” George Bernard Shaw explains: The only thing worse than not getting what you want, is getting it.  This is because most people don’t practice imagining experiencing what they wish for.  Also, most people dread precisely and dream vaguely. We can learn to dream precisely by practicing living our dreams. And we can also practice living what we don’t wish for. The Real Game, like no other educational experience, offers these opportunities. The Real Game offers more. By practicing making decisions and “experiencing” the results of those decisions, one can learn decision making skills and planning skills.

In today’s rapidly changing world we will need to learn to plan and plan to learn. In fact we should think of planning as learning. We will need to learn to be as capable of change as the environment.

The dramatic recent changes in the world of work have redefined where, when and how we work and eliminated the boundaries between working and living. So The Real Game is not just a career game; it is a life game. The High Five Principles and the Character Traits encompass much of the important lessons of living.

Like everything else, what someone wants to be may change and change again. But by learning decision making and planning skills and being capable of change through the accumulated lessons of real and imagined experiences, they will probably become what they want to be.

H B Gelatt 

I don’t want to be a butterfly, said the caterpillar, because I’ve never been one.   Stewart Edward White